Wednesday, 7 February 2018

'Finnegans Wake for Fritz Senn is what we do with it. But it is also what it does with us. We produce a wake by the way we steer, but we also steer by the Wake that we produce.'

Finn Fordham, Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake

One thing that many of us do with our Wakes is write all over them.This copy belongs to Danis Rose, co-editor of the 2014Corrected Text. Houyhnhnm Press put the photo on their websiteto show that Rose has put a lot of work into the book. Here he's not just annotated references and foreign wordsbut correctedthe missprints.You can see that he'smade 'camiflag' at 339.13plural with the addition of a red 's'.

This picture circulated all over social media after a Twitter prankster posted it claiming it was Susan Sontag's copy.Here's a witty comment from Eric Jarosinski's Nein Quarterly (A Compendium of Utopian Negation).

You can tell a lot about someone by the way they annotate their Wakes. Some readers, like Rose, write boldly in ink. Others write in pencil, showing a subservient attitude to the text, or perhaps the sense that their readings might change.Some annotated
Wakes are wild and free, with pages covered with a 'riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops
and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed'
(118.28). Other annotaters, like Roland McHugh, are neat and well organised:

'I began to annotate my copy of FW. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two FW lines, and I used twelve different colours of ink to specify different languages.'

Roland McHugh, The Finnegans Wake Experience, p56McHugh and Rose are both intentionalists - they want to find out what Joyce consciously intended when writing his book. Many of their annotations give the sources of his quotations, as revealed by his notebooks. In The Index Manuscript, Rose defines the Wake as 'an ordered aggregate of elements each of which can be identified with a unit entered in one of the notebooks....Without a
knowledge of the referents these structures are ultimately vacuous and
induce in the reader mental exhaustion (through the strain of supplying
forced referents).'

By 'supplying forced referents', Rose means reading the Wake creatively. Many readers, like Clive Hart, John Bishop and John Gordon, create their own meanings. McHugh quotes a letter from Clive Hart in which he attacks the intentionalist approach: 'For all we know, JJ may have intended FW to be a cookery book. Who cares what he thought? What are the book's intentions?'

Last September, the excellent James Joyce Gazettepostedthe picture of Rose's book on Twitter as the first in a series of annotated Wakes, using the hashtag #FWownnotes. The Gazette invited readers to 'Share pics of your personal copy of FINNEGANS WAKE … annotated!'

The second annotated Wake the Gazette shared belongs to the Spanish artist Dora Garcia. She's added post-it notes to her Wake. In 2013, Garcia made The Joycean Society, a documentary about the Zurich Wake group, which has been reading the book continuously since 1986. Her Wake shown here was displayed in her 2014 residency Of Crimes and Dreams, in the Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital in Aix-en-Provence.

These pages come from pages 228-9 in the children's games chapter. The area highlighted in yellow on the right page has Joyce's wonderful alternative comic titles for the central episodes of Ulysses: 'Ukalepe. Loathers’ leave. Had Days. Nemo in Patria. The Luncher Out. Skilly and Carubdish. A Wondering Wreck. From the Mermaids’ Tavern. Bullyfamous. Naughtsycalves. Mother of Misery. Walpurgas Nackt.'

Isn't 'Had Days' a great title for Hades? – Joyce's chapter about the dead of Dublin. Another brilliant one is Bullyfamous - Polyphemus the Cyclops - the Citizen as the famous bully!

Below is Marshall McLuhan's Wake from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library website. He was a respectful pencil annotator, and there are only a few annotations on the page displayed. But he was also a creative reader. In 1968, in War and Peace in the Global Village,he argued that the book's ten thunderwords each represent one of the technological stages of human history. His son Eric later developed the theory in a book The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake. It's shame the library doesn't show a page with one of those thunderwords. I bet it would be covered with annotations.

The next one comes fromthe copy annotated by another creative reader, the German experimental writer and translator Arno Schmidt (1914-79). It's from the website of theZentralbibliothek in Zurich.

A facsimile of Schmidt's annotated copy was published as a book in 1984, with 100 copies given free to public research libraries. I found this one on the Indiana Bloomington website.

'Schmidt's
readings of the Wake have left virtually no traces in Joyce
scholarship, and the reasons are quite obvious: being a strongly
original writer himself, Schmidt imposed his own eccentric conceptions
of the literary work of art on Joyce rather than looking for Joyce's
conceptions,and, moreover, Schmidt tried to overcome his “anxiety of
influence” by wilfully disparaging Joyce's character, the professional
Joyce exegets, and in part also Joyce's works, especially certain
aspects of Finnegans Wake. According to Schmidt, the scene of Finnegans Wake
is laid in Trieste rather than Dublin, and the whole book deals with
nothing else but the rivalry of James and Stanislaus Joyce over Nora
Barnacle.'

Imposing 'eccentric conceptions' on Joyce is a good description of the creative approach. Joyce wanted his readers to do just this. He told Adolf Hoffmeister that his book could 'satisfy more
readers than any other book because it gives them the opportunity to use
their own ideas in the reading.'

I was delighted to find this next Wake shared by the Joyce Gazette. It belonged to Karl Reisman, another creative reader.Until his death in 2014, Karl was a regular contributorto the online page-a-week Wake reading group, fwread. Its archived postings, painstakingly collected by Karl, can be read on fweet,where there's a page dedicated by Raphael Slepon to his memory.

Karl was an anthropologist, whose main interest was in African, Caribbean and African-American folklore and language. He argued that the Wake uses 'Creoles and other languages to subvert the fundamental bases of European culture and language dominance.'

In this page from the Anna Livia chapter, Karl found echoes of the Middle Passage and the presence of Jamaican Creole and Haitian Voodun.I
love the fact that all of Karl's annotations here have an African theme. He sometimes reminded me of Charles Kinbote in
Nabokov's Pale Fire, who relates everything in John Shade's poem to the kingdom of Zembla. But Karl, unlike Kinbote, was
well aware of what he was doing. After one particularly ingenious interpretation, he commented, 'I admit this is going pretty far, and I do not really
claim Joyce knew this or did it – but it would fit nicely. And is not
impossible.'

You can read Karl'sfascinating discussion of this on his website here along with several other articles.After the Joyce Gazette issued the invitation, readers started to come forward. The first was Susie Lopez, who's a yoga teacher and artist living in New York. She's been turning her Wake into a beautiful work of art. Here'sa climactic passage in the middle of the Séance chapter (Bk 3 III). I love what she's done with the SILENCE on the right page.

She's covered her pages with waves, trees, leaves and many other images. Have a look at Susie's astonishing work by following her on Twitter.

Here's
a wild and dynamic Wake from @Marcello Fanfoni, which he tweeted in
2016 after finishing the opening page. Good luck with the rest of it
Marcello!

For a comparison, here's how the Polish visual artist,
Jakub Wróblewski, has annotated the same opening page, after printing it on a much bigger piece of paper. With the scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik, he's been turning
Joyce's book into a film, 'First We Feel Then We Fall',
which you can read about here. The need to visualise the book means that lots of Jakub's annotations are lovely little drawings.

I'll finish with my ownWake. When I started reading it, in 1981, you could only buy the Faber paperback, which has much smaller pages than the hardbacks. I wanted to be able to write between the lines, like my tutor Charles Peake, whose battered heavily annotated copy was a source of envy to me.

I'd been reading it for a couple of years when my sister's boyfriend Michael tracked down a Faber hardback for me. So I had to go back and start again. Yes, I've annotated the Wake twice!

The yellowed colour of the paperback on the right is another reason you need to find a hardback copy. Its spine is also broken and the pages are falling out.

I ended up with minute handwriting, and I now need a magnifying glass to read my own notes.

So far, there aremore than twenty annotated Wakes to look at on twitter. I've only had room for a few here. One of the Wakes, which belonged to Delmore Schwartz, can be viewed in its entirety thanks to the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, who have digitised it. This Wake is so fascinating that it will get its own separate post.

Friday, 12 January 2018

'I remember Tom in Ottoline’s room at Garsington saying...how could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of
the last chapter?'

Virginia Woolf, Diary, 15 January 1941

From Hayman's A First Draft Version of FW

Joyce was only 39 when he finished writing Ulysses - an event hailed by Ezra Pound as the beginning of a new era of human history (post scriptum Ulysses). How would he follow it up?

The answer came on11 March 1923 (during Year 2 p.s.U.), when Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver:

'Yesterday I wrote two pages – the first I have written since the final yes of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so I could read them. Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice or the leopard cannot change his spots.'

That summer, from 21 June-17 August, the Joyces were in England, where Joyce renewed his friendship with T.S.Eliot. Here's a letter from Eliot to Joyce written on 25 June after a first meeting, in London:'My dear Joyce Can you and Mrs Joyce have tea with me tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5.30 at Frascati's (Oxford Street near the corner of Tottenham Court Road)? There will only be Lady Ottoline Morrell, who is very anxious to meet you....PS Please do not mention to Lady O.M. (if you come, as I hope you will) that you saw my wife. She isn't strong enough to see many people yet.'*Frascati's was a sumptuous and elegant jazz age restaurant, which you can see and read about here. Sadly we don't know what they all talked about. I'd love to know how the Joyces, especially Nora, got on with the terrifying Lady Ottoline Morrell!

'My dear Joyce Don't forget to write to me here your address in Bognor. I hope you will have no trouble in finding a good hotel. I want to get a car one day when I am in Fishbourne and fetch you over and show you some of the waste lands round about Chichester.' The Eliots had rented a weekend retreat nearby, at 2 Milestone Cottages, Old Fishbourne. Between Bognor and Fishbourne lies the village of Sidlesham, whose graves provided Joyce with the name for his hero, Earwicker. Did he find the Earwicker graves during a car excursion with T.S.Eliot?

Here's Joyce's hotel, the Alexandra, now a private guest house. I've visited it on two Joycean pilgrimages.

While Joyce was staying here, he wrote a fourth sketch, about St Patrick and the Druid - in pidgin English! He sent all these early sketches to Harriet Shaw Weaver, who typed them for him.

Joyce must have shown Eliot his new sketches, and talked about his writing. Eliot asked to publish a piece from Joyce's new work in his review, The Criterion, which he'd founded in 1922. But Joyce refused, as we know from a later letter sent to Harriet Shaw Weaver (see below).

Joyce, Pound, John Quinn and Ford Madox Ford in Autumn 1923

Back in Paris that autumn, Joyce wrote a fifth sketch, the 'Mamalujo' episode, a 'study of old age'. This was the first piece he agreed to have printed.

'Mr Hueffer (Ford Madox Ford) has been made editor of a new Paris review. The editorship was offered by a financial group on condition that nothing of mine was published in it. Mr Hueffer then declined it. Finally the group gave in. Mr Pound (to whom I had shown the pieces I have written) came round to say that the front pages of the first issue were to be reserved for me with a trumpet blast. I had previously declined to allow these pieces to be sent to the Criterion and, while I was grateful to Mr Hueffer for the attitude he took up, I felt (as I tried to explain to him) that I could not allow them to be printed yet. The construction is quite different from Ulysses where at least the ports of call were known beforehand.... I work as much as I can because these are not fragments but active elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin to fuse of themselves.'

To Harriet Shaw Weaver, 9 October 1923

Joyce's description of these pieces as 'active elements' is fascinating. He seems to have found, as he went on, that his book was beginning to write itself. His early sketches became what David Hayman has called 'prime nodes', which generated new material. In a brllliant 1978 essay, 'Nodality and the Infrastructure of Finnegans Wake', Hayman described the sketches as 'texts or pretexts to which the rest of the Wake will be added as commentary or shadow text'.

So 'Mamalujo' was published as 'From Work in Progress' in the transatlantic review on 1 April 1924. Work in Progressbecame Joyce's working title, used right up until Finnegans Wake was published in 1939.

Meanwhile, the book was taking a whole new direction with the growth of his central character, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their children Shem, Shaun and Issy. Joyce set aside the early historical sketches, and began to develop the Wake family. By March 1924, he had written rough drafts of seven of the eight chapters of Book 1 of the Wake (the opening chapter would be written in 1926).

In 1925, Joyce felt ready to publish more extracts from his new book. He gave the opening of the HCE chapter, telling how his hero got the unusual name of Earwicker (FW pages 30-34) toRobert McAlmon, his friend and patron. McAlmon published it the Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, in May 1925.

In February 1925, Joyce, suffering from severe conjunctivitis, got Lucia to write to Eliot agreeing to publish another extract in Criterion. Here's the letter that Eliot sent in reply, on 26 February 1925:

Dear Miss Joyce, Thank you so much for your letter as we have been very anxious for news of your father's health. I am very sorry to hear that he has been having such acute trouble and that the physicians have not yet finished with him.... I am delighted to hear that I may soon have some of his work to publish. Will you tell him that I have refrained from bothering him but had been constantly hoping to hear. I should like to have the manuscript as soon as possible for the June number, as the April number has already gone to press.

On 15 April, Eliot wrote to Sylvia Beach, who had forwarded Joyce's piece:

Dear Miss Beach Thank you for your letter and for Mr Joyce's MSS. which I am delighted to have. Will you, when you can, convey my and my wife's deep sympathy to him and to Mrs Joyce? I should be very grateful if you would let me know later the result of the operation.

The text sent to Eliot was an early version of the wonderfulLetter chapter (FW 104-25) which begins:

In
the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of
Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run,
unhemmed as it is uneven!

This was published as 'Fragment of an Unpublished Work', in Criterion III, July 1925.

I couldn't find the issue with Joyce in

Joyce continued to have severe eye problems, and was told he needed yet another eye operation (the eighth). It was while waiting for this, in Rouen in August, that he wrote his parody of The Waste Land which I included in my last post.

But we shall have great times,
When we return to Clinic, that waste land
O Esculapios!
(Shan't we? Shan't we? Shan't we?)

At the same time, he wrote a letter to Eliot which has not survived. But here's Eliot's reply, dated 24 August 1925:Dear Joyce, I was glad to have a letter from you after being without news of you for a long time. I hope to be able to get to Paris before the end of the year, but I am not certain and therefore it is good news to hear that you are likely to be in London in January. I am sorry to hear about your past and future operations and hope that the next one will be the last.

Eliot stands proudly outside the Faber office in 1926

In
late 1925, Geoffrey Faber, who had been running a scientific press,
restructured it as a general publisher, Faber and Gwyer, and invited
Eliot to join the board. Faber and Faber, as it was later called, also
took over the Criterion as a house journal. This meant that Eliot
could give up his day job working for Lloyds Bank and become a
full-time publisher of books.But would he be able to publish James Joyce? *A big theme running through Eliot's letters is Vivienne's mental and physical health. She
was diagnosed with a bewildering variety of illnesses (entero-colitis,
enteric influenza, septic influenza, malnutrition, anaemia, complete
exhaustion, general neuritis, rheumatism all over her body, violent
neuralgia). She had electric treatment, Plombieres treatment (colonic
irrigation), 'manipulation and hand vibration', a starvation diet and psychoanalysis. None of it helped.